Sibir: My Discovery of Siberia

by Farley Mowat

  “When our government (he meant the government of the Yakut A.S.S.R) saw what was happening, complaints were made to Moscow. At first nobody listened. The Russian engineers and technicians said it was the only way things could be done. They said Siberia was so big, a little mess here did not matter. But our President carried the matter to the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet and in the end we won. It will not happen again. I have visited all the new diamond mining centres and there is none of this destruction. Now we will watch carefully those who are not always concerned enough about the consequences of their actions.”

  Sasha seemed subdued as we landed on a paved runway long enough to take the largest Soviet aircraft. During our entire visit to Mirny he remained subdued, only speaking when he was spoken to. Although he never said so, there was no doubt in my mind: for him, this was alien territory.

  We were met by a suave, heavy-set young Russian sporting a van dyke beard and dressed as if he had been fitted out on Savile Row. His manner was efficient, and remote. Pavel Vecherin, deputy editor of the local paper, and public relations man for Mirny, would have fitted easily into Toronto or New York.

  Vecherin showed me all of Mirny I cared to see, but for the first time in the Soviet Union I was unable to establish rapport with the people of a community. This was not entirely Vecherin’s fault, even though I could not persuade him I was more interested in people than in statistics – it was mostly due to the fact that the inhabitants of Mirny seemed to live within their own personal solar systems. Almost all of them were young. They had great energy, great ambitions – and little common ground. Having come here from all over the Soviet Union, they had created an efficient artificial environment in the midst of the taiga and within it were living artificial lives. By Soviet standards they were extremely well off, and they were proud of the fact. Most of those I talked to had visited Yakutsk and were disparaging in their comments about it.

  “An old-fashioned, ugly, uncomfortable place,” one of them called it. “I’m grateful I’ve never had to stay there overnight.”

  There was certainly nothing old-fashioned about their city. Mirny is one of the avant garde cities of the U.S.S.R. Beginning as no more than a few log shanties thrown up by the first construction teams in 1956, it grew rapidly through an adolescent period of timber barracks and apartment houses and then exploded into a welter of masonry and metal buildings embodying the latest refinements in Soviet northern building techniques and design.

  Mirny has everything. Its 38,000 people have a T.V. and radio station, daily newspaper, library with 200,000 volumes, two theatres, five cinemas, the most modern hospital I have ever seen, paved roads, a brewery and a vodka distillery, an advanced educational system including a technical school with 1,100 students, dance groups, choirs, children’s musical schools and … you name it, Mirny has it. Most of its citizens live in cleanly designed five- to seven-storey apartment blocks, intelligently sited, and tinted in gentle colours to take away the blight of naked concrete which disfigures so much recent Soviet (not to mention North American) architecture.

  The wages are 2.5 times the going rate for equivalent jobs in European Russia. Air transportation (there is no other kind except for the winter truck convoys) is so good and so cheap that people think little of flying eight hundred miles to Irkutsk or 1,200 to Novosibirsk for a short weekend outing, or 3,000 miles to Moscow or Leningrad for a long weekend.

  Food is good and cheap and far more varied than in Moscow; and the same applies to all consumer goods. And what is very important in the U.S.S.R., the citizens of Mirny enjoy a special prestige throughout the country. They are the hardy pioneers who produce the diamonds without which the great (and never ending) industrial leap forward would be impossible.

  Young, vigorous, athletic (men, women and children play hockey on outdoor rinks with fanatical enthusiasm through eight months of winter), the people of Mirny quite evidently believe in the image of themselves which is presented to the rest of the Soviet Union. They seem to have everything required from life … except the inner certainty which displays itself as an outward tranquility and which belongs only to people who have, for a long time, been in harmony with the world around them.

  The feeling of impermanence, of not being rooted, was apparent in conversations I had with several residents of other new northern cities. A gifted young interior designer summed it up this way:

  “Our new cities are built by the young and they belong to the young. They are full of challenge and excitement and quick change. But, you know, even in the ones that were started thirty or forty years ago there are very few older people. When a man or woman gets on a bit, something seems to happen. The city they helped build doesn’t have any place for them any more. They begin to feel uneasy in it. So when retirement time comes – it comes early for us northerners – many people don’t stay on. They go back to where they came from, hoping they’ll feel wanted there.”

  I discussed this attitude with Nikolai Yakutsky.

  “Yes,” he said, “this first generation of new Siberians are a nomadic people. Perhaps most of them will never be real Siberians … but their children will. It will happen to the children as it did to the Old Russians who came out here hundreds of years ago. They will become part of this land. There is one danger. It is that the new people may forever alter the nature of the land through carelessness or by trying to reshape it in the way they shaped the European country. We don’t want that to happen. We want things to remain uniquely Siberian until the youngsters who are born here can grow up and learn to love it as it is, and to protect it for others as we are trying to protect it for them.”

  The Russians who came to Yakutia centuries ago did not change the character of the new lands. Heavily influenced by the Yakut and Evenk cultures, they conformed to the country and became part of it. Whether modern men can or will follow the same pattern remains to be seen. If they do not it will hardly be the fault of the Yakut people, who take their role as conservators of the human and the natural heritage with deadly seriousness.

  As we drove out of the city toward Diamond Factory No. 3 – a monstrous, aluminum-sheathed, windowless monolith standing fourteen storeys tall on the desecrated tundra plain – Vecherin was still spouting statistics. “Our city is a league of Soviet peoples. There are forty-six nationalities working and living here.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’ve noticed the variety. But I haven’t noticed many Evenk, Yakut or others of the Small Peoples. Can you tell me why that is?”

  Vecherin gave me an answer that I had heard in substance many times before from white North Americans.

  “It is not because we practise discrimination. But it is true that these people are only a few generations away from the Stone Age and most of them don’t take kindly to city and factory life, perhaps because they are not ready for it yet.”

  However, there are some spectacular exceptions in Mirny, and I am still wondering how Vecherin manages to fit them into his glib evaluation of the native peoples.

  One of them is Alexei Nikolaievich Stepanov, a smiling, compact Yakut of thirty-six years of age. He is the Director of Diamond Factory No. 3. Alexei was responsible for the design and construction of the factory (the largest diamond-processing plant in the world) and not only supervised its construction but was the leader of the team that worked out the novel separation and processing system and designed the equipment which makes the plant so efficient it runs day and night, summer and winter. Undeterred even by 70° below zero weather, it sometimes produces enough diamonds in the space of a single day to pay the whole of the annual operating expenses.

  Alexei Stepanov was born on a cattle farm. After graduating from the Yakut State University, he took his Master’s degree at the Moscow Mining Institute, and came to Mirny in 1958. His rise was meteoric. Sasha, who knew him in Yakutsk, described it to me.

  “When Mirny was started there was nobody in the Soviet Union with specialist knowledge about diamond mining or processing. Alexei probabl
y didn’t know any more about engineering technology than the others who were working on the problem, but he did know more about Yakutia and conditions here, and he thought every difficulty through in detail as a Yakut would. In a very short time the other technical people were coming to him for answers, and his solutions almost always worked. They worked so well that he became manager of Factory No. 2 (No. 1 was a pilot plant). There he originated the advanced processes which are now standard in all our diamond factories. But, you know, it isn’t so surprising. Remember that the Fire Stones of Siberia were discovered by the Yakut before there was a Russia.”

  Alexei Stepanov showed us through his plant, which was cavernous, unbelievably noisy, filled with gigantic machines, and almost totally automated. He seemed amused at my anxiety to get out of the place. When he had seated me in the comfort of his office, he showed me a Tsar’s fortune in uncut diamonds and seemed even more amused at my attempts to appear properly impressed. As we were parting he drew Yura and me aside.

  “Sasha has told me something about you, Comrade Mowat. Fire Stones are one thing – but hunting a bear in the taiga is another! I’ll take a few days off work and we’ll go to a place I know … Sasha and you and me and Yura. You will like that more, I think.”

  It was the nicest offer I got in Mirny; and I shall be eternally sorry that I was unable to accept.

  Twelve

  IF THE GLOSSY modernity of Mirny failed to move me to any marked enthusiasm, Chernychevsky did. The town was born in 1960 on the banks of the Vilyui about a hundred miles northeast of Mirny and soon became the home of some 12,000 people engaged in building a most unusual hydro-electric project.

  We drove to it through rolling taiga on a newly built road, hard topped by nature with glare ice. The skating rink surface did not seem to trouble our driver. Siberians do not bother spreading salt or sand on icy roads, nor are the tires of their vehicles equipped with special treads. Survival depends solely on the driver’s skill.

  We reached the deep and shadowed Vilyui valley and turned along it. Suddenly our view of the dark gorge was shuttered by a towering grey shape. Although recognizable as a dam – and a mighty one – it was quite unlike any of the great dams I had ever seen. Instead of the usual shining walls of white concrete lifting in precise lunar curves, here was a jumble of huge rock fragments rearing skyward in such apparent confusion that at first glance it seemed as if a natural cataclysm had stoppered the gorge.

  The Vilyui dam is two hundred feet high, a third of a mile long, and built almost entirely of materials found in the immediate vicinity of the site. No concrete was used in the main construction. The cement which binds rocks, clay and gravel into a unified whole capable of withstanding the pressure of a reservoir 320 miles long, is natural too. It is eternal frost. The dam is a staggering demonstration of how Siberian builders have learned to collaborate with a primordial force which they once thought of as their mortal enemy.

  The leader of the Vilyui dam builders was a greying, rather ordinary-looking man, a bit pudgy but with clear eyes and an expression as relaxed and amiable as his manner. Gavriel Bijanov had spent thirty years building power dams, but he looked as if he might have spent those years as a gentle schoolteacher.

  He met me at the door of the big log building that serves as construction headquarters and in lieu of the cool handshake I had received in Mirny, he hugged me hard.

  “Welcome!” he said. “In 1962 I visited your country and travelled in your north – now I am happy to be the host to Canadian friends!”

  The key people of his staff had gathered to meet us in the usual conference room. All save Gavriel seemed very young. Most were men but there were several women amongst them. Most were of European extraction but there were a number of Siberian natives. Gavriel’s second in command, Nikolai Atlasov, was Evenk. We were greeted with the kind of warmth I had come to accept as characteristic of all Siberians.

  These people were unregenerate enthusiasts and each was determined that I should hear every detail of the story of Chernychevsky. Gavriel’s attempts to quieten them were the half-hearted attempts of a proud father in the presence of his precocious offspring. Nothing could wait. I had to hear everything, and see everything immediately – if not sooner.

  I listened for two hours straight until someone leapt to his feet and insisted we go and look at the dam itself. No matter that it was pitch dark outside and the temperature was 24° below zero. Off we went, slipping and slithering along the unfinished crest of the huge structure. Gavriel suggested that we might knock off for a little supper; but the chief of the powerhouse, Ivan Drobishev, pleaded with us to at least take a glimpse into his house of wizardry tunneled into the solid rock beneath our feet. The glimpse took an hour, and even then he was loathe to let us go.

  We eventually snatched a bite to eat in a cafeteria and then went at it again until well after midnight, viewing an excellent film record of the building of the dam. Finally we were driven to the guest house – an elaborate. A-frame structure beautifully sited on a wooded hill, designed, built and decorated by the dam builders themselves. It was the most comfortable and attractive hotel I encountered in the Soviet Union.

  But were we allowed to fall into soft beds and die a little – as Nikolai Yakutsky would have said? By no means. Instead we were served a banquet which extended through another couple of hours of talk. When Gavriel finally took pity on us and declared the party at an end, he got reproachful looks from several of his assistants who claimed they had only begun to tell the story. I went to bed exhausted – paralyzed would be closer to the truth – but I did not mind. I had listened to a splendid saga, a very human tale, and had seen at least an indication that modern men may yet manage to reverse the attitudes which are making us outlaws on our own planet.

  Some years prior to my visit to Chernychevsky I spent a winter day in the Moscow offices of the Institute of Northern Planning. This agency, more than any other, has been responsible for originating and implementing the policies which have revolutionized northern development in the Soviet Union. The staff consisted of dedicated northerners who talked about their work with great frankness, beginning with an explanation of why the Soviet Union has become so deeply involved with northern regions.

  Apart from the natural inclination of any country of pride and energy to develop its own resources, the U.S.S.R. has, ever since its birth, been under additional pressures to do so because, wherever possible, the capitalist powers have denied it access to world sources of raw materials. The Soviets were forced to make the most of what they could find in their own territory. Since over half of that territory lies in the north (arctic and subarctic), northern development early became essential to survival.

  There were other factors. As far back as the late 1920s there was concern over the steady build-up of industrial concentration, and consequently of human populations, in already densely populated regions of European Russia. This concern originally arose out of military considerations but later became a matter of urgent social consciousness. Through the years more and more Soviet planners in every field were converted to the concept that the dispersion principle must triumph over the agglomeration principle. As one of the Institute’s members put it:

  “Although we knew it would be difficult and costly to reverse the world-wide trend toward population concentration, we believed dispersion was a more natural and reasonable principle and would produce a better environment for human beings. People would have breathing space, for one thing. For another, the entire country would share a similar economic level. There would not be any areas of economic and social backwardness and so there would be no tendency toward a continuing depopulation of peripheral areas because of economic deprivation.

  “Decentralization and dispersion were taking place as early as the 1930s but many people then thought only the central and southern portions of the Soviet Union could be treated in this way. It took much hard work to convince everyone that the northern regions could absorb and support m
odern habitation centres on a large scale. Now we have reached the point where we have devised a northern technology capable of creating living conditions almost anywhere in the north which are as good as those in, let us say, Moscow, and in many ways are even better.

  “Those of us who fought for the development of the north had additional reasons to inspire us. There was the question of the future of the Small Peoples. We never did believe it was permissible to leave them to decay in ignorance and apathy in regions which were to lie outside our new society; nor did we think it wise or right to take them out of their northern world and transplant them into our southern way of life. Lenin insisted, and we agreed with him, that it would be much better to take the modern world to them.

  “The wisdom of this is surely clear from the fact that, instead of being a burden on the State, the Small Peoples are now full partners with the rest of us in developing the New Life in the north.”

  A young woman in charge of social planning for the north added this comment:

  “Human beings must have challenge! That is understood by any thinking person; and we know the best challenge is the one which is the most natural. If men do not have such challenge they find it in unnatural ways – perhaps in a fierce competition for power or money; perhaps in internal struggles that tear a society apart; perhaps in external struggles that become bloody wars. We know all this, you see; and so we have deliberately offered to our people – particularly the young – the challenge of the north, which is a challenge of nature. They have responded with enthusiasm. It is not good to give people security of body alone … we must also make a valid and good purpose for life. Those who go north find such a purpose.”

  It was early recognized that northern development on a big scale required careful planning, but until the end of the Stalin era the planning was rather haphazard and sometimes bungled. Stalin was a Georgian and apparently never had the feel of the north. Under Khruschev things were different. Tremendous efforts and vast sums of money went into planning and into research to back the plans. At the same time tens of thousands of scientists flooded out over Siberia to conduct the most intensive surveys and to compile the most complete inventory of resources ever undertaken by any nation. This resulted in the discovery of nearly every important raw material required by modern technology and, to the perturbation of some Western powers, it assured the Soviet Union of internal self-sufficiency in raw resources, if it proved possible for them to develop these resources on an economically realistic basis. And that was the rub. No country, communist or capitalist, can remain healthy if the things it purchases with its labour or its money are worth less than what it cost to get them. However, the Russians found sound economic methods for developing their northern resources while at the same time turning an almost empty wilderness into a suitable habitat for modern man.